Rowena Mason writes about energy for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. Contact her at rowena.mason@telegraph.co.uk.

BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill: when disaster vocabulary spreads out of control

Someone really needs to have a quiet word with whoever is in charge of oil spill vocabulary at BP.

When the energy giant’s well in the Gulf of Mexico first started leaking, it initially sounded comforting that a “subsea containment system” would be deployed to cap the gusher. No one had any idea what one of these looked like – but that’s because it hadn’t actually been created yet.

Unofficially known as the “top hat”, it basically involved putting a big box over the leak and trying to pipe oil up to the surface. BP cautioned that this terribly complicated “system” had never been tested at such depths. Actually, it had never really been tested much at any depth – apart from some makeshift equipment cobbled together to mitigate spills during Hurricane Katrina. When the fancily-named method failed, it was the beginning of my lost faith in BP’s press releases that disguised under-preparation for a deepwater disaster in official jargon.

Then we had the riser insertion tube tool (RITT), otherwise known as the “siphon”. Again, this was an elaborate-sounding method that was frighteningly simple in concept – likened by one expert to dangling a hose pipe off the top of a block of flats, aiming for a hole the size of a golf ball. Its success rate was marginal.

After that, came the dramatic phase, where the aggressive, tersely-termed “top kill” (pumping in heavy fluid) and “junk shot” (shooting in debris) appeared to be dead certs for halting the flow. But why on earth would anyone call a technique “top kill”, unless the results were actually, definitely, 100pc going to be a superlative effort at snuffing out the leak? Despite giving the impression that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be drafted in to attack it with a enormous machine gun, both were a failure.

Another desperate attempt to stop the Macondo well from spewing 5,000-plus barrels into the ocean and there’s some more verbose nomenclature. Make way for the Lower Marine Riser Package Cap Containment System (LMRPCCS), which appears to be exactly the same as the top hat, but a bit bigger.

What’s next? Is that Superman on the horizon with an Executive Underwater Wellhead Strangulation Execution Programme? Or has the BP board just sent Tony Hayward down in a really tight scuba diving suit to have a go at switching off the taps with his bare hands?

It’s now clear that no amount of complex language can disguise the fact that those in charge of the operation are inventing implausible solutions as they go along, rather than calling on any known technology. And while oil companies and the regulator may have paid lip service to emergency “plans” to tackle deepwater well blowouts, these precautions ought more aptly to have been called emergency “theories”.

There's no doubt that BP is throwing everything it possibly can at the problem. But it doesn't change the fact that no existing equipment was available to plug a gushing deepwater wellhead. The only tried and tested way of stopping an oil leak is drilling a relief well, which takes up to three months to complete.

As for who’s to blame for this embarrassing situation, culpability surely has to be split between the regulator – who should have insisted on tangible methods to deal with deepwater rig failure – and BP – which could have saved itself a lot of time and money if it had invested in post-blowout technology in the first place.